Listening the other morning to McCoy Tyner’s Expansions, I was reminded of an aspect of my playing that defies, much of the time, a basic tenet of jazz. Bill Evans once said that jazz is defined by the following equation: it is music in which one minute of composition equals one minute of performance. For my part, I have never, according to Evans’ or any other definition, been a jazz drummer. My playing is too loud, my strokes too discrete, my approach too aggressive to flourish in an environment that requires the high level of trust I admire in jazz.
There is, however, an element of jazz to which I cling and from which I derive a fundamental quality of my practice. I mentally refer to this quality as banking, and it works something like this: any piece of music, however worked-over or spontaneous, should have as its goal the creation of energy. The goal of this energy might vary but its presence must be assured by the performers. So if I set out to provide a beat for my bandmates, my aim is twofold. On the one hand, my beat is additive, complementary to the existing parts, confirming their energy and directing it with my own. On the other hand, I’m exerting my energy to overwhelm the other parts, not to bury them but rather to contain them, to mete the energy we create together. This containment, this reserve, amounts to a banking of energy; that is, if you will indulge an analogy, the energy is held in escrow until such time as the deal is closed.
One obvious way to handle this reserve is dynamic, the loud-quiet-loud mode, for example, that many of us practiced through the 90s. It continues to be a useful approach, though I sometimes think it exhausts itself too quickly, expressing its energy before there’s been sufficient time to build it in the first place.
I have come to better appreciate duration as a banking means. There was a stretch several years ago when I held to a belief that a given tune should only be as long as was required to express a single kind of energy. So if it took two minutes to perform a piece into a recognizable state, then the tune would be limited to a two minute duration. Since that time, mostly after working with my friend, the guitarist Joel Wickard, I have learned to work out longer ideas, to accept the unwinding of ideas, and to engage energies that might take longer than a couple of minutes to take effect. Lessons learned from film and video artists (Chantal Akerman, Bill Viola, Tsai Ming-Liang, et al.), to say nothing of the musicians and composers who have captivated me in their durational or repetitive studies (Philip Glass, Peter Gabriel, The Eternals, Do Make Say Think, David Grubbs, McCoy Tyner, et al.), I strive to keep the available energies in proper reserve, in scale with the group’s intention. So if it takes several minutes to manage the energy of a given piece, the duration is only prohibitive if a) the banking and meting of energy is poorly paced; and/or b) there is some proscriptive limitation on the piece’s duration (e.g. commercial radio).